So, if you get contacted by a recruiter trying to lure you away from a company you love, here's one strategy: Get them to feed you contact information for their own best engineers, under the pretense that you're fascinated by their client but need to do some technical due diligence.

Then poach them right back.

All's fair in love and war, right?

Harry Heymann, a lead engineer at Foursquare, summed up the strategy nicely in a funny comic (which was apparently made by Exec cofounder Justin Kan) on Quora: